Thanks to all those who voted for me, and all those who participated in this compo. And of course special thanks to Qube!

A minor whinge (if I may): I'm a bit disappointed by the low number of voters! I'm sure our games were downloaded by many more members of SyntaxBomb than who voted, and that's a pity. More voters next time, I hope!

I played all the games for a minimum of 15 (or was it 20?) minutes - an hour each on average, I think. Vanarchy (a practically perfect arcade action game IMHO) nearly 2 hours. So I reckon I gave each game a fair play (even the one that hurt my brain and made me feel rather thick!). As always, I appreciated the effort, skill & creativity that went into all of the games.

I'm OK with the number of voters. Of course it's a bit of a shame that the number of voters doesn't scale with the number of entries. But you name a pretty good reason yourself: 1h playtime per game for 11 games. There goes your day. Voting is quite a bit of work with all the downloading and gaming, sometimes it even involves going back to the download thread and read the instructions there.

Honestly I didn't give each game an hour; I was done playing them all after 4 - 4.5h. If a game doesn't manage to be either self-explaining or come with an instruction, then it's in my opinion still fair if you give this game only 5 minutes. And I think it's fair solely because it's a game comp and not a tech-demo comp, and one of the steps from tech-demo to game is including playability. I know I've done the same mistake myself in the past (shame on me), but we should not expect someone to invest more time into finding out how a game works than into actual gaming.

We (or I) want a fair voting, that's for sure. And for it to be fair, all games have to be played for a while, maybe multiple times. And here's the dilemma: If only a few votes come in, they have to be reliable - but exactly this takes a lot of time, which not everyone has. So I prefer having only a few votes - but good ones - over a shitload of based-on-screenies votes.

And also, I have to say this: please post your entry as a .zip file (not 7-zip or self-extracting installer whatsoever) containing the portable version of your game plus a readme.txt, if instructions are not in the game. Yes, I don't trust installers. Installers are for applications that need to rely on third party libraries being copied to some places and linked and whatsoever and shortcuts on the desktop and in the start menu and shit in the registry being fucked up. For portable software, like I consider our games to be, an installer is just a waste of time. I don't know if GameMaker can only release Projects by building an installer - in that case 🤷. And also yes, I'm more than happy when I can access your game from my working computer that doesn't have 7-Zip installed This did NOT in any way influence my voting. This time. But if we're having a 10+ entries compo again, I know by what criteria I'm doing the first sort out

@ playing timeSeriously said you will never play all games equally long - some games have less to show, so you are done there after x minutes, others have more gameplay stuff going on - or make you addicted somehow. You won't make each new member a voter but if only 10% of the new people would vote then you only need 10 new users to receive an additional vote.Here I am with you Holzchopf - better some votes which really played games (sorry Mr. Win32 who could not play all games - next time please state it before you give your vote :-)) for at least some minutes (so actually run them on their computer) than ones just voting because they are "coding buddies" or got hinted to "come back to here" via some external threads (think this did not happen yet). Or worst thing have a vote via "Click here to vote X as game of the competition" (leading to some kind of "link spam" in other forums).

@ 7-zipI use it as archiving rate is way better and I still pay for traffic (hosting on a metered server - most terms disallow "download servers") and also want to help people with slow internet connections. I also do not have a computer here which does not have 7zip installed, think even the file explorer on my smartphone handles 7z.www.7-zip.org - it is free (compared to WinRAR) and does feel "odd" like the windows-inbuild-zip-thingy.

Nonetheless I would provide a .zip file if that was a requirement of the competition.

Installers: why didn't you just unpack the .exe file? Some basic installers are similar to self-extracting zip-archives, so they are easy to "unarchive" and you can just run the runtime-executable plus the data package. But still I am with you there - it is not necessary for such games to be made "non-portable".

Gamemaker 2 definitely does output to just a zip file for Mac if that's preferred. For Windows an installer can be created which just seemed to be the logical way to go. However, I'll change it to use zip from now on because at least you can copy it where you like and know that an uninstall is just deleting the folder rather than worrying about any other crap that an installer might shovel at you.

As for what Derron says, I think anyone who ever tried to canvas for votes by giving a link to the thread from a seperate website would be instant disqualification. The rules would prevent that happening anyway - with the 3 months, 10 posts or submit your own game restriction.